Sunday 21 July 2013 17.05 EDT
First published on Sunday 21 July 2013 17.05 EDT

When Bradley Wiggins triumphed in last year's Tour de France, there was much national rejoicing and hoopla. Kids from Kilburn were not supposed to win the Tour de France, he reminded us. But here was just such a lad who had grown into a sideburn-sporting, guitar-collecting, occasionally crotchety but likable bloke who had battled all manner of often self-inflicted adversity to become the first Briton to roll into Paris wearing the iconic maillot jaune.

By contrast, when Chris Froome emulated Wiggins's achievement by mounting the top step of the podium on the Champs Elysées in Paris on Sunday night, his achievement is likely to have been greeted with little more than a collective national shoulder-shrug. Such ennui seems unfair on a rider whose achievement, it could be argued, is more impressive than that of last year's winner. With all due respect to Richie Porte, Froome, unlike Wiggins, will have been forced to win the Tour without the help of a wingman as strong and obdurate as, well, Froome.

Make no mistake, Froome is the best rider in this year's Tour but for a short time it looked as if insufficient support from visibly leggy team-mates might deny him victory. There are those who argue that Froome was also the best rider in last year's Tour, when the only conspicuous threat to the relentless Wiggins march on Paris came briefly from the man tasked with getting him there as race leader and in one piece.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about Froome and his hugely impressive victory that has failed to capture the public imagination to even remotely the same extent as that of Wiggins. It may well be because there are so many different reasons and it is simply Froome's bad luck that most are not of his own making.

A ruthlessly ambitious competitor in a truly brutal sport, he is approachable, perfectly nice and almost unfailingly polite in his myriad dealings with the media. Despite this, it's probably no exaggeration to say that, given the choice, most media folk would prefer to sink a few pints in the company of the far spikier but more charismatic Wiggins.

Chalk and cheese then, but for all his obvious non-Wiggoness and conspicuous lack of Wiggotude, there seems no obvious single reason why the British public shouldn't clutch Froome (who, it's worth repeating, seems a genuinely nice fellow who has done an incredibly difficult thing) in a warm congratulatory embrace. The list of successful high-profile British sports stars who are not as cool, charismatic and funny as Wiggins is a long one, but many on it are regarded with more affection than the astonishing athlete who just won the Tour.

Lance Armstrong has a lot to answer for. The first cyclist in history to never win the Tour de France despite winning it seven times, he spent much of his career looking cycling's sceptics and accusers in the eye and telling them lies, in the process demonstrating that the emphatic denials of a guilty athlete sound identical to those of an innocent one.

Repeatedly forced to field similar queries while attending to his many media obligations as the maillot jaune, Froome's understandably chippy announcement that people calling him a cheat and a liar was "not cool" was one of very few times he came close to cracking publicly on or off the bike at any point during this year's Tour. Again, it is simply his misfortune that he happens to be the first cyclist to win the Tour since Lance sat down with Oprah Winfrey.

But despite Froome's obvious frustration in the face of understandable scepticism, history and Lance have taught us that we are perfectly entitled to our suspicions. On Irish radio last week, the journalist and former pro cyclist Paul Kimmage said that Froome and his team have a duty of care and responsibility to their sport and those of us who have stuck by it despite its apparently endless capacity to let us down.

"I've never, ever, ever seen anything like what I saw on Sunday," said Kimmage of the Froome assault on Mont Ventoux that was astonishing in its brutality. "What we saw on Sunday was shock and awe, and given what we've had in the sport for the last two decades, now is not a good time to be selling shock and awe."

Kimmage was quick to stress that he simply doesn't know whether Froome is up to no good or simply the greatest cyclist of all time, and it is hoped his success has been achieved without skulduggery, beyond poorly timed snacking. But until such time as his team are even more forthcoming with the secrets of their latest Tour de France winner's astonishing success, it is once again the rider's bad luck that buyers of his unique brand of cycling shock and awe will naturally beware.